All related applications are incorporated by reference. The present application is based on, and claims priority from, China Application Serial Number No. 201210391564.3, filed on Oct. 15, 2012, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to an input device and, in particular, to a touch panel and the manufacturing method thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, touch panels have been used as a new generational of input devices. As an input device, the touch panel is the most simple, convenient and natural human-computer interaction device. Touch panels have been widely used indifferent electronic products, such as game consoles, smart phones, tablets, PCs, and soon; wherein these electronic products are generally formed by integrating a touch panel and a display screen. Through functional icons showing on the display screen, users are allowed to touch the touch panel to input signals without using any other input devices (such as buttons, keyboards or levers), thereby significantly increasing the inputting convenience.
A touch panel usually includes a touch substrate, a sensing electrode matrix formed on the touch substrate through a photolithography process, insulating layers, conducting wires, protective layers and others components. However, a photomask is used during the photolithography process, and since different touch panels may have different specifications, such as sizes, reserved edge widths, layouts of the conductive wires, so the photomask can not be reused and needs to be redesigned when manufacturing touch panels with different specifications. Moreover, because of the difference of size between the photomasks, the production line needs to be changed frequently when manufacturing different touch panels, which not only influences the yield and productivity, but also wastes a lot of manpower, financial and material resources.